Dallas mortuary’s TV show is a controversial undertaking

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Lara Solt/Staff Photographer

John Beckwith Jr. (center), owner of Golden Gate Funeral Home, and funeral home employee Dr. John Mosley (right), greet each other at the red-carpet event for the new reality TV show Best Funeral Ever.

But even for a shameless genre that spawned such boob-tube tomfoolery as All My Babies’ Mamas and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the latest lure, Best Funeral Ever, may take the cake.

Most shocking is that the TLC series, which debuted as a pilot program in January and made its season premiere Monday night, was launched at one of the most respected and largest African-American funeral homes in the nation.

And that, for better or worse, happens to be in Dallas, at the Golden Gate Funeral Home, a fast-growing family-owned enterprise that is a force to be reckoned with in the multibillion-dollar-a-year nationwide funeral business.

John Beckwith Jr., a charismatic 47-year-old whose uncanny sense of humor belies his profession, is the front man for Best Funeral Ever, which turns the solemn into spectacle.

Episodes feature everything from fake mourners, which Beckwith says he’s never used other than in the TV show, and a wedding for the cremated remains of a couple that died 10 months apart.

Nothing seems off limit, whether it’s putting someone in a chocolate casket or staging a track race for a former Olympic runner.

For all that, Beckwith has been lampooned. Some critics say he’s turning the mortuary business his parents founded into a national laughingstock.

“It’s official,” Nsenga K. Burton, an editor-at-large for The Root, wrote after the pilot aired in January. “Reality-television executives have lost their minds … setting back images of black folks in television at least 60 years.”

You won’t hear me trying to talk Burton out of her unsparingly harsh characterizations. Black folks waited forever for some TV show to put their family life in a positive light. So it’s fair to wonder whether this genre is working to undo what The Cosby Show finally achieved 29 years ago.

“I get what they’re saying,” Beckwith said. “But there is another side of the story.”

And here’s where Beckwith shines, where his business savvy shows and one appreciates the method to this madness.

“One of the biggest problems we’ve had in the funeral business was it’s so secret,” he said.

So a few years ago, to demystify his trade, Beckwith started hosting a local weekly TV and radio program called Ask the Undertaker.

He also launched a ride-along program that allows people to shadow Golden Gate officials and observe how they work with families.

“The only limitation we have is that they are not allowed to go into our morgue, for privacy reasons,” he said. “And they can’t go into our files.”

Beckwith is breaking down other barriers, too: In a business that remains largely segregated, he’s trying to attract more Latino and Anglo families.

“We want to bury everybody,” he said. “But more than anything, when a family walks through those doors, we want to make them feel special and empowered at a time when they’re grieving.”

His easygoing if unorthodox approach is working. The small business that started in Waxahachie 33 years ago has expanded to Fort Worth and Louisiana and settled into larger digs in Oak Cliff.

The funeral home buries or cremates about 2,500 people a year and generates about $10 million a year, he said. “We’re definitely in the Top 5 of any nationwide black funeral homes,” he said.

Beckwith isn’t taking criticism of the reality show lightly. When some of his longtime customers first saw it, he said, “They were like, ‘John, what are you doing?’ We really surprised people with the plot.”

“We were a little upset” at the initial reaction “because we thought people knew us,” he said. “More than 98 percent of our services are traditional.”

Several families featured in the show were among the 200 guests at a red-carpet event that Beckwith and the show’s producers hosted Monday night at the University of North Texas at Dallas.

The families said the zany services were cathartic for them and in keeping with the spirit of those laid to rest.

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